A couple of years ago, the TF2 community came together with the #SaveTF2 movement, which managed to get a reaction from Valve but little more than that. The game has gotten some bug fixes, VScript support and 64-bit builds, but there’s been no action taken against the true problem – the bot crisis.
This timeless masterpiece has been plagued by cheater bots in its casual matchmaking mode for over 5 years, making it frustratingly hard to play, without resorting to community servers. VAC is a complete joke and the lack of response from Valve is deplorable, for a game that is otherwise well known for making great games.
For the past few weeks, lots of content creators have been posting calls to action, investigations (such as the great two parter from Zesty) and opinions, all culminating in a main effort: the save.tf petition.
At the moment, it’s approaching 200k signatures! If you appreciate the game, help us out by signing the petition :D
One of the most critical things they have to revert is the voice command mute of F2P. This kills a very important game mechanic for newcomers, while not really stopping botters, since they will just spend money and unlock the features for their accounts, as it’s evident when you join a casual match.
Another obvious thing is: improve VAC. And to reply to your next point, yes, it is a joke. No, it’s not a joke because it’s not a client-side anti-cheat. Lots of community servers operate essentially with no cheaters, because they employ better protection SourceMod plugins and empower users further. For example, Uncletopia and Skial are very much bot-free, and creators.tf was too, before it shut down some months ago (due to unrelated issues). If the community can develop these effective server-side plugins, so can Valve, and most likely do a better job at it. They have incredibly talented people working there, I’m sure they could make a way better VAC if they wanted to.
And yes, community servers are currently the salvation for people who want to play TF2 unencumbered by swaths of bots. I play mostly on Uncletopia nowadays because I agree with most tweaks they apply (it’s not 100% vanilla casual) and the skill ceiling is a bit higher as well, which pushes me further.
Some sort of federation of community servers, where bans and whatnot are shared between instances sounds like a pretty good idea.
Edit: Ultimately, however, Valve should fix the vanilla casual mode, that’s where the vast majority of players are, and where newcomers will first go to.